SANTA FE, N.M. – Secretary of the Interior Ryan Zinke has recommended budget cuts that create unsavory conditions to public lands and parks in New Mexico, according to conservationists.

It begins with an 80 percent reduction to the Land and Water Conservation Fund then goes on to cut $30 million from national parks maintenance.

Chris Saeger, executive director of the Western Values Project, says these moves directly hinder the recent attendance growth in New Mexico's outdoor recreation areas, hurting the local economy.

"Interior's own research shows there has been an increase in visitation to national parks throughout the American West,” Saeger points out. “They know it's time to make these investments. They know it's time to catch up on the maintenance backlog that the National Park Service is facing in order to accommodate that."

Zinke has said public land management in the U.S. has been dysfunctional for three decades now and he's begun rescinding national monument statuses along with his budgetary recommendations.

Saeger calls these actions "shortsighted" because they hurt access to the outdoors, mostly in favor of increasing development for oil and gas businesses.

Zinke's budget slashing also is being criticized by the National Parks Conservation Association. It says the 6 percent cut to staff actually will translate to 12 percent because of the seasonal, part-time nature of work by rangers and field managers.

This, he says, will result in longer wait times, and reduced quality of services across the public lands that make up one third of New Mexico.

Meanwhile, Saeger says eliminating national monuments so the state can purchase back land is more lucrative for the extractive businesses that pick up property for drilling and mining.

"What's a problem is that this budget is underfunding public access, while at the same time Interior is taking steps outside of that, playing favorites with the oil and gas industry that wants to make a profit off these lands and do it at the expense of people who value it for hunting and fishing and camping," he points out.

Along with devising a new budget, Interior is gathering public comments and conducting a review of national monuments in New Mexico and nationwide.

Bureau of Land Management Resource Advisory Council meetings have been canceled until the national monument review has been completed.




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Conservation groups are rejoicing over the decision Friday by the Biden administration to reject a proposed mining road in Alaska.

The 211-mile Ambler Road would have sliced through the Gates of the Arctic National Park and Preserve, severing the migration route for a Western Arctic Caribou herd.

Alex Johnson, interior Alaska director for the National Parks Conservation Association, said it was important for the feds to take a stand in Alaska so mining interests do not start eyeing other national parks.

"This is a very expensive, destructive and just highly speculative project that does not in any way support our clean energy goals as a country," Johnson contended. "And ultimately would permanently threaten the health and well-being of local communities and the tribes."

Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowski slammed the decision, warning it could limit jobs and tax revenues for Alaska by preventing exploration for minerals she said are important to national security, like copper, cobalt, gallium and germanium.

Jayme Dittmar, a photographer and filmmaker from Fairbanks, said the road would have been very disruptive to the 66 Native American villages along the proposed route.

"That'd be 168 trucks passing through close vicinity to the villages," Dittmar pointed out. "There would be hundreds of bridges built. It would dismantle a subsistence livelihood that's been in place for thousands and thousands of years."

The road was seen as a negative for tourism to the Brooks Range area. According to the Alaska Travel Industry Association, Californians make up 9% of visitors to Alaska.

Arizona conservation groups and sportsmen alike say they're pleased the Bureau of Land Management will now recognize conservation as an integral part of public lands management.

The agency's new rule puts protecting the environment on par with other land-use priorities.

Scott Garlid, executive director of the Arizona Wildlife Federation, said historically the BLM has done what he termed a "pretty good job," not only managing about 12 million acres of public lands in Arizona, but also protecting natural resources.

"They've got a tough job," Garlid acknowledged. "I think this rule helps make their job a little bit easier because it gives them some tools to balance those different demands on the 12 million acres that they manage."

Garlid predicted the rule will raise what he terms "harder-to-quantify conservation values" to the same level of importance as more extractive land uses like oil and gas exploration and mining. He thinks most Arizonans will recognize the new rule as a positive. A solid majority of Arizona voters across party lines say they are conservationists and use public lands for recreation.

To Garlid, the rule makes it clear the BLM is recognizing certain parts of federal lands, in Arizona and around the West, have been degraded. He contended restoration leases will be a good tool, allowing the BLM to lease acres to groups specifically to improve the conditions on a given landscape. He noted opponents of the new rule might see the leases as a way to "lock up" land but he argued it is not true.

"One example could be a nonprofit, like the Arizona Wildlife Federation," Garlid pointed out. "We could get a conservation lease from the Bureau of Land Management to do riparian restoration work, or work to remove invasive species along a creek bank."

According to the BLM, while a restoration or mitigation lease is in place, casual uses of the leased lands like recreation, hunting, fishing and research activities would generally continue.

Support for this reporting was provided by The Pew Charitable Trusts.

State and federal agencies are collaborating to increase the use of prescribed fires in the Northwest.

Prescribed fire is the controlled use of burns to minimize the larger risks of wildfires and smoke. It is seen as an increasingly important strategy as wildfire seasons pose greater threats to the Northwest.

Casey Sixkiller, Northwest regional administrator for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, said authorities want to work together to maintain forest habitats.

"Prescribed burn is one of the best tools we have for making our forests more resilient against catastrophic wildfires and they help to manage and target hazardous fuels and make for healthier forests," Sixkiller explained.

Sixkiller pointed out the EPA is involved because wildfire smoke poses risks to people's health. The collaboration is between federal agencies, departments in Oregon and Washington, and tribal governments.

Sixkiller noted the collaboration needed a formal agreement to move forward.

"That is what we've been able to do here with this agreement," Sixkiller emphasized. "To get federal land managers and states and us all in the same room, making sure that we're all on the same page about what success looks like."

Sixkiller added the collaboration has another advantage: It helps drive engagement with communities potentially in the path of prescribed burns.

"They have the confidence that the effort that's gone into planning that activity has been thought out from soup to nuts," Sixkiller acknowledged. "And that they have a seat at the table and are being engaged and their concerns are being addressed as we go forward with that activity."


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